Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Where Baby Orwell Lived

1903 There are big plans for the nondescript birthplace of Eric Arthur Blair in India.Credit
Agence France-Presse

The Bihar provincial government in India announced recently that it intended to restore George Orwell’s birthplace, in the town of Motihari, and open it as a museum. Doesn’t hurt to be reminded that Orwell was a child of the Raj — as was Kipling, whose birthplace, in Mumbai, is already a museum — but it’s hard to imagine that the Orwell bungalow will become much of an attraction. Orwell spent a mere year there, his first, and Motihari, on the Nepalese border, is one of the remotest places in India.

That we tend to fetishize writers’ residences is a little odd to begin with. By and large the same fuss doesn’t get made over places where artists have lived, and yet you could argue that an artist’s surroundings have more bearing on his work. But birthplaces themselves are an even odder subcategory, certainly less interesting, in general, than the houses where writers have actually worked.

The Walt Whitman birthplace, now hemmed in by malls in Huntington, N.Y., for example, is less remarkable for what it says about Walt, still harnessed in apron strings when he moved away, than about how Long Island looked before there were driveways and satellite dishes. Much more revealing is the two-story row house in Camden, N.J., where Whitman spent the end of his career, visited by literary celebrities like Oscar Wilde but also regarded as the neighborhood weirdo who kept his shutters closed even in daylight.

Whitman died in the Camden house — in an upstairs waterbed of sorts, which had been contrived to keep him more comfortable — and that’s a plus, too, for when it comes to rating literary residences, poignancy counts. Wilde, at the end of his life far lonelier than Whitman, died in a dreary upstairs Paris hotel room, where he supposedly remarked that the wallpaper might kill him. You can stay in the room, but, sadly, they have changed the paper, so on a literary pilgrimage this particular shrine merits only three and a half stars. Four stars, however, for the house at 26 Piazza di Spagna, just off the Spanish Steps in Rome, where tubercular John Keats breathed his last, after subsisting (doctor’s orders) on a single anchovy a day.

Also visit worthy are writers’ residences that suggest industry and diligence, with extra points for hints of scrabbling and penury. On these grounds Samuel Johnson’s London house, off Fleet Street, with a factory-like upstairs room where he worked on his dictionary, rates far higher than his birthplace museum, in Lichfield, which gives little clue to the hardship that the Great Cham later endured.

Arrowhead, the farm near Pittsfield, Mass., where Herman Melville wrote “Moby-Dick,” has a pleasing and appropriate air of loneliness and isolation about it. The house of Melville’s friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, in Concord, Mass., where he wrote “The Marble Faun,” is far grander but deserves at least partial credit because when you go upstairs you discover that he wrote standing up, on a little shelf deliberately set so it faced away from the windows.

Also pretty grand is the Emily Dickinson homestead in Amherst, Mass., where she too toiled away in an upstairs room. Points here because this is essentially birth and death place rolled into one. Dickinson seldom left it, and even today the place feels both inspiring and a little claustrophobic.

Lamb House, a Georgian brick residence at the end of a picturesque street in Rye, England, is worth a trip for a different reason. Three writers lived and worked here: Rumer Godden, E. F. Benson and, originally, Henry James, who loved to dictate long sentences in the walled garden (he had given up longhand). James was a fussy host and a little house-proud (he had reason to be), but he was happier there than he ever was in his family home, which was a rat’s nest of neurosis and sibling rivalry. Lamb House still breathes contentment.

And then there are the follies, the writerly houses that never quite worked out for their owners. The Mount, Edith Wharton’s 35-room house in Lenox, Mass., was built to demonstrate her forward-thinking and pared-down aesthetic, though by today’s standards it seems lavishly grand. Wharton lived there for only eight years, from 1902 to 1910, when her marriage collapsed and she moved more or less permanently to France. The place remains a monument to her industry but is also a bit of a white elephant. It was a private residence for a while, then a girl’s school and the home to a theater troupe and lately has struggled to stay open as a museum.

Not too far away, near Brattleboro, Vt., is Naulakha, which Rudyard Kipling built in 1892. It’s a big, dark-green shingled house, with one end shaped like the prow of a boat, perched on the side of a hill. Kipling had high hopes for the place and America in general, where he had moved because his new wife, Carrie Balestier, was a Vermonter. But Naulakha was a failure — not so much on literary grounds (Kipling wrote “Captains Courageous”and most of the “Jungle Books” there) as on social and political ones. Kipling quarreled with American foreign policy and also fell out with Carrie’s brother. After just four years he packed up and never returned, leaving behind his bed, his pool table, his golf clubs.

There is nothing ghostly about the place, however, because it’s now owned by the Landmark Trust U.S.A., which rents it to visitors. This is a fate that ought to befall more writers’ homes. Imagine if you could spend a week at the old Philip Roth apartment in Newark, using the very refrigerator where they kept the liver. Or a weekend at Tom Wolfe’s place on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, poking through the closets. As for their birthplaces, who cares? Nobody is born at home anymore, and who would want to make a literary pilgrimage to a hospital?

A version of this article appears in print on January 17, 2010, on Page WK5 of the New York edition with the headline: Where Baby Orwell Lived. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe